Welcome to the Mile High Fight Club. Liam Neeson gets his glare on in this thrilling, action-packed whodunit set on board an airplane, which blends the crowd-pleasing intrigue of an Agatha Christie murder mystery with the brutal force of Taken at 40,000 feet. Non-Stop keeps you too busy clinging to the edge of your seat to cynically probe for plot holes, providing relentless entertainment from take off to touchdown.

Neeson is perfectly cast as alcoholic air marshal Bill Marks, haunted by a turbulent past and reliant on secretly consuming a stash of booze and fags to keep him going during the commercial flight. That's pretty much standard for a Ryanair trip. But soon, he receives a series of cryptic text messages containing threats to kill a passenger every 20 minutes unless he stumps up some serious cash. $150 million to be precise. That puts the EasyJet 'speedy boarding' charges into a bit of perspective.

The viewer is consequently forced to play detective alongside Bill, as he races against the clock to figure out the identity of his foe. As the death count starts to rise, we're soon left wondering whether Bill can trust his shady fellow passenger Jen (Julianne Moore) and air hostesses Nancy (Michelle Dockery) and Gwen (Lupita Nyong'o), who help him to whittle down the suspects. Hold on, can we even trust Bill?

Director Jaume Collet-Serra does a wonderful job at making such a limited spatial environment feel dynamic and fresh, by using clever camerawork to weave through the aisles and across the passengers in the metal tube as it hurtles towards an uncertain future.

Yet he also knows when to tighten the visual noose, inducing extreme claustrophobia at tense moments like the fierce fight sequence between Bill and one of the suspects set entirely within an airplane's bathroom. There's barely enough room for one person to take a leak in one of those places, let alone two to have a full-on brawl. Yet it appears utterly convincing and enthralling.

The cast is perfect at deploying glances and narrowing the eyes at certain points to arouse our suspicion, particularly Moore and Dockery. Their familiarity to viewers works well alongside the twisting plot, as Hollywood convention tends to dictate that those with the biggest 'star power' will come to the fore - and Non-Stop has great fun toying with the audience with this.

Now in his 60s, Liam Neeson still manages to be convincing as the action tough guy with his imposing physicality. Yet it's the flexing of his thespian muscles that lie at the heart of his appeal, as he manages to instill Bill with enough depth to make him appear credible as an empathetic and troubled human being too. He even succeeds in generating poignancy amidst the chaos, with a mournful speech to hysterical passengers in which he admits "I'm an alcoholic, I was afraid... I'm not a good father."

Such a confessional should reek of awkward contrivance and be stilted in the extreme, much like some of the other manipulative plot mechanics elsewhere. But it all works to nail-biting effect due to the conviction the actors and director have in the script. It's taut, immersive and rattles along at such pace you barely have time to shove a sweet in your mouth to stop your ears popping.